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Sunday, 27 March 2011

Very curious about Baechler's take on the becoming in his new book. He starts out talking about three layers of things, the human, the living and the physical - associated with three types (or directions) of science. The three of them, it turns out, are intrinsically historical (the historicity of the last one being a recent development. Therefore, any metaphysics guided by science should look at the becoming and its workings. Did anybody already read the whole book?

Sunday, 20 March 2011

Went to one of the meetings of Badiou's seminar on "Qu'est-ce que c'est changer le monde" last Wednesday at the ENS. The theatre was full, I sat on the corner of the stage. He arrived and apologised for the room so packed and the subsequent lack of proper seats for the audience. (I agreed with Lise Lacoste that it is always interesting to notice how things get started...)

His philosophy of events was made very appealing. He explored a bit the space between the pure being and the worlds - a world being where whatever there is (and ontology is mathematics) gets implemented. He then moved to the Jasmin Intifadas to consider what he calls the Problem Stalin, or how to preserve the political force of a revolutionary event. A million people (in fact less than that) in Tahrir square became Egypt in the streets. Yet it is a small minority if we think in terms of elections. It is, he goes, a dictatorship (of those in the square). Is the run-of-the-mill, business as usual, low intensity democracy the best way to preserve the force of this (dictatorship-like) event? He calls this the problem called Stalin. Surely, it has equivalents wherever truth emerges (not only in politics but also in love, in science and in art). How to keep the force of an event? In a museum? In the wedlock?

How does one preserve the exception? (Events happen where the things are busy being but they are not themselves part of the ontology - this is a way maybe to build a Lévinas-proof philosophy where there is no all-encompassing ontology.) Or, rather, how can we create an order that preserves the elements of a disorder? Perhaps in the case of art, or maybe of love, someone could say that the event is not to be preserved but rather multiplied. One needs more poems, more falling in love, more sculptures made of ice. But the problem in the ontology of politics, I guess, is that legitimacy cannot come from anything by the force of a political event (say, the act of establishing a social contract, or getting together to create a country etc). One could say that democracy is event-free politics. Still, it needs a constitution etc - who votes? Why not les bêtes sauvages? So, for example, the application of any law needs to refer to the legitimating event that made a piece of writing a law.

In any case, this is how the media present the problem of Maghreb, as a Stalin problem: will they create a way to preserve the Intifadas? And most of the media means that the problem is already solved, it is through the usual democratic institutions (and not through what Khadafi describes as a political system without leadership) that a revolutionary event is preserved. The issue seems to be: there is much space for manoeuvre and manipulation when there is an event to be preserved (and this is the Stalin problem, I suppose). I would tend to think that since there is no preserving (of events or of whatever), there could be no (proper) ontology of the politics if it ought to refer to founding events. It's all about distorting: how to bend them, how to interpret them, how to make use of them. But maybe Badiou is somehow implying that it is more of an open problem, maybe there is a way to preserve the force of a political event at least in its liveliness. But then again, how can one have an ontology that preserves the exception to ontology? Maybe then politics is always away from ontology and the latter is no more that a political museum, made of the left overs of politics.

Monday, 7 March 2011

Last Friday I talked a bit about post-humanist politics at the really really free school. Discussion was rather good afterwards as it normally is. Debra Shaw insisted that a post-humanist focus on machines rather than animals (my primary focus, as it were) would take us in very different directions. I was surprised that the Anerkennung tradition got mentioned and linked to revolution. And, of course, when we start talking about (mutual) recognition it is difficult to step outside the humanist tracks.

I should have insisted more in the idea that there is no ready-made humanity. I did that only by considering humanism a form of identity politics, and presenting some criticism of the way some of those identity politics are pressed (like identity is given by nature or it is an effect of the way our enemies treat us). Should have brought up more of my dearest Lucia Garrido, my anti-humanist alter-ego...

One way to develop further Souriau's idea of 'instaurer' is to think that things are more like countries than like babies. We shouldn't look so much for parents and gods but rather for diplomats, warriors and cartographers. Countries are often redrawn in the map, new countries emerge from existing ones etc. I always think that there should be a connection between the Kripkean idea that the reference of proper names relate to their name-giving act and Souriau's ontology of instauration (bringing about). If we consider things (and people, and places and whatever can bear proper names - or even beyond that limitation) in the way maps portray countries, we don't appeal much to descriptions to fix the reference (only to descriptions of the sort 'east of' etc). I grant that reference fixing without description is one strategy to bring about things, among others. But it is an interesting one. Once something is brought about, then it can be put to all sort of different uses and therefore be described in many ways. The fact that bringing about is often independent of the use we now give to something is what may somehow give the impression that the ultimate bringing about act was a creation ex nihilo

Tuesday, 1 March 2011

When I think about pure potentiality, an image that comes to my head is money. Enough to think about Rodrigo Triana's 2006 flick, "Soñar no cuesta nada". A bunch of soldiers uncover packets and packets of cash and that was a trigger for many dreams. Dreams are departures from the existing, they are believable because they are possible - potentially existing. In any case, money incarnate potentiality that didn't turn into anything yet. (The actualist, by the way, could have problems understanding the value of money as such.)

The idea of matter is that of something that has no more than a one dimension limitation: that of its quantity. Matter is supposed to be independent from any form as form is the intellect that shapes it. (Venkatachalapaty remarked last week on my Madras talk on tantric ontology that potentiality would also needs a guiding intellect, therefore something to shape it; otherwise, it lacks any quality). Surely one can find things common to the mobile phone by my side and the potato I'm eating - for instance, electrons. They can even be responsible for some of the dispositional properties matter display; that is, material things qua material things. However, this would not entail that matter is the ultimate repository of both potentiality and passivity as by itself it doesn't act. In fact, the idea that something holds a pure potentiality - as much as the idea that something is purely contingent and therefore independent on anything else - is a bad starting point for a metaphysics. Matters, as Jane Bennett would put, vibrate, tremble, have capacities, lack resources, make alliances and enjoy their particular matrix of speed. There is no such thing as the servant waiting for orders. Matter is a product of a fascist metaphysical imagination, as I once put (in E&E).

Materiality has all sorts of implications and the idea is probably deeply entrenched in current western thought. (It's sexuality has been debunked by Butler when she points out how the idea of matter is also hostage to a specific sexuality - in the first chapter of "Bodies that Matter". Guided by some Irigarayan intuitions, she links it to the erotics of domination.) Matter has also its economics. Today I thought matter not being readily available, someone had to somehow invent it: the erotics of money. Money is the best approximation of matter. In fact, when we think of things made of matter, we think in terms of investment. Money comes in from one source and then somebody does something with that raw material (the wealth that carries no smell). That's the economic result of our ontological (materialist) imagination: wealth should be understood as having no form, it is pure flux, has no shape, no bound, no boundaries, no territory. Money is always flirting with virtuality. That's maybe the economics of materialism: the economics of the money buying everything because there is a common denominator to everything. That's why the ultimate possession one has is money (and capital). And the usual substrata posited for things lie in their material constitution.

Capital, ever flowing and rarely getting stuck, goes around with its becoming matter. Of course, it doesn't buy the hunger of a wild animal. But it buys a fence to keep it off.

No Borders Metaphysics

This is my blog which explores and puts forward the idea that reality has no arché. Its url is named after a group in Brasilia that meets regularly to discuss issues to do with the interfaces between ontology and politics. It started out in a dialogue with the renewed interest in metaphysics and metametaphysics both by speculative philosophers and by analytical metaphysicians. In its first year, it discussed my ideas in connection to those of Harman, Kripke, Meillassoux, Brassier, Kit Fine, Viveiros de Castro, Reid-Bowen, Hamilton Grant, Latour, Schaffer, Bohn, Mumford, Horgan as well as Meinong, Heraklitus, McTaggart, Souriau, Deleuze, Guattari, Haraway, Molnar and Heidegger. It is mainly dedicated to consider how a new metaphysics should look like and is interested in ontologies with space for urges, plots, perspectives, indexicalities, alliances, holisms, occasionalisms, powers, fragments, doubts and networks (not necessarily at the same time...)